On a chilly February afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia, last year, hundreds of background actors filming a boxing-match scene for "Creed III” were asked to move from the arena they’d been cheering in to a large tent nearby. Once inside, they took turns sitting and cheering again, except now they were sitting by themselves in front of a circle of small cameras that filmed their movements in great detail. A production assistant behind the cameras held up cue cards. "Stand up!” said one. "Cheer!” said another. The scans would be used to fill out crowd scenes, they were told, making 200 human actors look like thousands.
Stephen Shutters was one of those actors, and he didn’t think much of it at the time. "No one did,” he says.
Now he is thinking about it. He wonders wahat MGM Studios, the production company behind "Creed III,” did with his scans. Were they deleted? Were they used for another film? Did they help train an AI model that could conjure fake background actors? At the time, the studio didn’t say or offer any sort of paperwork for the scanning.
MGM did not respond to a request for comment. Shutters’ hindsight comes thanks to growing corporate interest in using generative AI to replace background actors in films, an idea that would take crowd-filling effects to the next level. It’s one thing to conjure a few buildings out of CGI and maybe populate an arena, but individual human actors?
The idea isn’t outlandish; I made my own AI clone without too much trouble earlier this year. And the prospect has fueled the first strike by both Hollywood actors and writers since 1960, with unions calling for better pay and more transparency over what happens to a performer’s digital likeness.
They are well within their rights to do so, and if studios continue to resist those demands (which they appear to be doing so far), they’ll be acting like hypocrites. Studios themselves are under threat from having their content scraped too — by AI companies — and without proper permission or proper financial compensation. Broadly speaking, everybody needs to start disclosing how digital content is being used and paying people fairly for it.
Encouragingly, things seem to be moving in that direction. OpenAI this month signed a deal with the Associated Press to license its news archive and the AI firm also expanded its licensing deal with Shutterstock, the stock-photo provider, to help it produce more realistic AI photos. Such deals are critical to making AI tools like ChatGPT smarter and also fairly compensating content creators.
In movies, though, OpenAI isn’t a big player. That role goes to other AI companies such as Runway, a New York-based startup whose system can generate brief video clips based on text prompts. The tool was used to help create the whimsical "rock scene” in the Oscar-winning film "Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The scene looks realistic enough you may not even be able to tell it was AI-generated.
Runway’s technology was also used to make a short film called "Thank You For Not Answering,” which has more of the warped, weird quality of AI content, with AI-generated human faces that wobble and contort (see below). But such systems are improving, especially when trained on more footage. Runway has trained its AI tools on a variety of datasets, including one comprising 240 million images and another with 6.4 million video clips. A spokesman for the startup did not elaborate on their sources.
Background actors (formerly known as extras), as well as small-time actors who have walk-on parts on TV and movies, are probably the most vulnerable to these kinds of tech advancements. A studio could, for instance, get an actor to come in for two days’ worth of filming instead of 10 and use the footage to train an AI system to generate their "acting” for the rest of the film.
Studios have told the U.S. actors union SAG-AFTRA that they can protect a performer’s digital likeness. That’s a good start, but if they are going to take away several days’ worth of wages from performers, that also limits their potential to build a career or hold on to work for long enough to get their big break. At the very least, they should ensure that those actors’ likenesses aren’t just "protected” but properly compensated, with future uses disclosed.
Streaming companies like Netflix Inc. have become notorious in Hollywood for hiding their viewership numbers, claiming there’s no way for them to know how profitable a show is. That’s hogwash and is almost certainly aimed making it harder for production staff to negotiate for better rates. How can they, after all, if they don’t know how successful a show or movie has been on a streaming platform?
The latest strikes demonstrate that Hollywood and the streaming platforms need to end their culture of secrecy around content — from viewer numbers, to their practice of scanning background actors with no agreements over use. Contracts for background actors aren’t so common, particularly in Atlanta, where many films are made thanks in part to the almost nonexistent union presence. Shutters, who worked on "Creed III” in Atlanta, says he’s never signed a contract with a film studio over its use of his work. He’s only ever had to deal with tax paperwork or nondisclosure agreements for doing movies for the Walt Disney Company. Perhaps that should change.
Dariush Seif-Amirhosseini is another background actor who remembers being asked to visit a trailer while filming "Cruella” in 2019 and being scanned for 10 minutes in front of a plastic rig of cameras. He was told it was crowd filling, but has no idea what happened to the footage afterward. The experience now haunts him.
"Once I started seeing digital replicas of major actors in Hollywood films I started to think about my experience,” he says. "I think it will put a lot of people out of jobs. It’s very lacking in soul. It doesn’t feel morally or ethically correct.”
Hollywood is almost certainly building its own set of demands for AI companies. But it should heed those same demands from performers too, or the business of making movies will become more soulless all around.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.